EVANSTON, Ill. -- Sandra R. Waxman, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a 2007-08 James McKeen Cattell Fund Fellowship.
Waxman is well known for her pioneering and provocative research on the link between language and conceptual development in infancy. She will use her fellowship opportunities to write a book on her recent research on how the language and culture in which people are immersed affect the acquisition of knowledge about the natural world.
For that work, Waxman and Douglas Medin, professor of psychology at Northwestern, lead an interdisciplinary research team, including psychologists, linguists and anthropologists. They have initiated an extensive research program with young children and adults from a wide range of language and cultural communities. They include urban and rural U.S. English speakers from majority culture and Native American populations.
The researchers are interested in how very young children from each population conceptualize the natural world and how their early notions are affected by the language or belief systems of the communities in which they are being raised. The research offers evidence of strong universal patterns in most fundamental notions of the natural world. It also highlights striking differences that illuminate intimate connections among culture, language and the organization of knowledge.
The research has focused, for example, on the concept of living things, a core concept that spans both the plant and animal kingdoms. Waxman found that children and adults in each of the populations studied appreciate this overarching and rather abstract concept of living things, but the scope of the concept is "tuned up" by their linguistic and cultural communities.
For example, by four or five, Maya children raised in rural Mexico judge that plants and animals are "alive"; by six or seven, Indonesian-speaking children raised in urban Jakarta say that plants and animals are "alive." But the English-speaking children, whether they are raised in rural Wisconsin, urban Chicago or suburban Evanston (a relatively well educated community) are reluctant to judge plants as "alive."
The researchers found that roughly 50 percent of the nine- and 10-year-old English-speaking children agree that plants are ‘alive.’
"Our research suggests that the reason that U.S. children, relative to Indonesian- and Maya-speaking children, have a problem understanding that plants are alive has to do with the cultural differences in the emphasis placed on the concepts ‘animal,’ ‘plant’ and ‘person,’" Waxman said. "That difference is reflected in the language and belief systems of the children’s communities."
A common concern underlies all of Waxman’s work, including her research on early language and conceptual development in infants and toddlers at Northwestern University’s Project on Child Development as well as her cross-cultural research on notions of the natural world. She is concerned with identifying how innate capacities are fine-tuned by the environment, including the language and cultural environment.
"My work largely is devoted to infants and young children from diverse cultures, because they are the only ones who can answer questions concerning the origin and evolution of knowledge," Waxman said. "In my view, these are the most important questions in cognitive science today."
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation appoints fellows on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. Waxman is one of more than 2,800 applicants from the United States and Canada to be named a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow. The 189 artists, scholars and scientists granted fellowships this year received awards totaling $7.6 million.
The James McKeen Cattell Fund provides support for the science and the application of psychology. The Cattell Sabbatical Award Fund supplements regular sabbatical allowances provided by recipients’ home institutions to allow extension of leaves for research. The fund has formed an alliance with the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the Cattell sabbatical award winners will be highlighted at the APS annual convention and in the APS Observer.
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